NASA has released a tantalizing teaser photo ahead of releasing next week the first images from the highly anticipated James Webb Telescope - a powerful instrument that allows scientists to peer back into the origins of the universe.

Launched in December last year, the $10 billion observatories is orbiting the Sun a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, allowing it to peer through dust and gas as no telescope has ever been able to do.

NASA released a test photo on Wednesday, the result of 72 exposures over 32 hours that shows distant stars and galaxies. The first fully-formed pictures are scheduled to be released on July 12.

NASA said in a statement that while the image has some 'rough-around-the-edges' characteristics, it is still 'among the deepest images of the universe ever captured' and provides a 'tantalizing glimpse' of what is to come in the coming weeks, months, and years.

'I was amazed at the level of detail in this photograph,' says Neil Rowlands, Honeywell Aerospace's program scientist for Webb's Fine Guidance Sensor. In a statement issued by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Jane Rigby said in a statement that the 'faintest blobs in this image are precisely the types of faint galaxies that Webb will study in its first year of science operations.'

NASA administrator Bill Nelson said last week that Webb will be capable of reaching even farther into the universe than any telescope before it. 'This is going to be a project that will look at objects in the solar system and the atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, which could provide us with clues as to whether or not their atmospheres are similar to our own. '

There may be some answers to some questions that we have: Where do we come from? What is out there? Who are we? And, of course, there are some answers to questions for which we do not even know the answers.'

Infrared time travel capabilities are part of Webb's ability to see back in time to the time of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, which happened around this time.

Due to the expansion of our Universe, the wavelength of light from the earliest stars shifts from the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths that they were emitted into, to the longer infrared wavelengths that Webb is equipped to detect with an unprecedented degree of precision.

Currently, the earliest observations in cosmology date back to 330 million years of the Big Bang, but with the capabilities of Webb, astronomers believe that the record will be easily broken.